That same spring Rosen’s team built a ground model of the satellite and took it to the Paris Air Show. Setting it up in a booth at Le Bourget Airport, they took video shots of passersby, relayed them 10 feet via microwave to a satellite on a stand, then to a receiver that demodulated the signal and displayed the image on a screen. “It was a real prototype satellite, except for the distance,” Rosen says. In August NASA gave Hughes a contract to build the satellite.
Syncom 1 exploded on launch in February 1963, but that July Syncom 2 was successfully launched into what Rosen describes as a geosynchronous orbit: It circled Earth at a consistent height and longitude, but not precisely above the equator. President Kennedy, in the White House, used it to speak with Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, the Nigerian prime minister, in Lagos-the first live two-way, head-of-state telephone call via satellite relay. Then came Syncom 3. With its greater bandwidth, it could broadcast television. The next year, Rosen told the New York Journal-American that geostationary satellites could result in a million-channel communications network that would relay TV, voice, photo facsimile, and teletype all over the world. Today a Harvard Web site lists hundreds of satellites—Early Bird, Intelsat, Agena, Raduga, Superbird, Gorizont—used for the applications Rosen predicted, as well as for remote sensing for scientific, meteorological, and military purposes.
As a boy in New Orleans, Rosen loved to curl up with one of his dentist father’s physics books: “I loved the mathematics.” He still does. He wasn’t sure he would accept the Discover Award, he says with a smile, because it’s given for lifetime achievement and he’s not finished achieving. He retired from Hughes in 1993 but consults with Boeing Satellite Systems, the firm’s successor, and has also launched his own firm, Volacom.
His new passion is creating another high-altitude communications platform—one that could circle the sky above a city, for example, and provide cheap broadband Internet access, telephone, and local television. He thought about dirigibles, balloons, manned aircraft. “Nothing seemed practical, but then we thought: What about unmanned airplanes?” Working with his engineering partner, J. B. Straubel, and airplane designer Burt Rutan, Rosen developed an unmanned plane powered by a hydrogen engine. It would fly 11 1/2 miles up in a city-size circle, covering less ground than a satellite but having “thousands of times the communication density,” says Rosen. “It’s still a dream. We don’t have FAA or FCC authority to proceed. But as soon as the first high-altitude plane flies, applications will flood in. I think we’ll fly the plane in two years.” Rosen glances at the television. “I like to watch movies,” he says. Then he presses the remote and Tom Hanks disappears—Rosen’s really too busy to watch anything.
